Staten Island
The free ferry from Lower Manhattan takes about 25 minutes, and somewhere in the middle of the harbor — with the Statue of Liberty off the port side and the Lower Manhattan skyline shrinking behind you — Staten Island stops feeling like a consolation prize and starts feeling like the point. This is the borough that 70,000 people cross water for every single day, and most of them aren't tourists.
What they're crossing into is a place of genuine contradictions: the oldest surviving schoolhouse in America sits a short drive from the only freestanding Frank Lloyd Wright building in New York City. Five of Wu-Tang Clan's founding members grew up in Stapleton. Cornelius Vanderbilt, once the wealthiest man in the country, was born here and never entirely left.
💛 What travellers fall for
People who come back tend to build a loose circuit: the ferry at an off-peak hour for the harbor views, then the Staten Island Railway south toward Historic Richmond Town or the Jacques Marchais Museum of Tibetan Art — a genuinely strange and specific institution that rewards the detour. Snug Harbor on a weekday, when the grounds are quiet, is worth the whole trip on its own.
Deals in Staten Island
Book directly at the providerHow Staten Island came to be
Giovanni da Verrazzano sailed past in 1524. The Dutch, who named it Staaten Eylandt, attempted settlements after 1630 but spent decades in violent conflict with the Raritans and Unamis — the Pig War of 1641, the Whisky War of 1642, the Peach War of 1655. A lasting colony, Oude Dorp, finally took hold in 1661 near South Beach, with Pierre Billiou, a Walloon from Belgium, among the petitioners for the first land grants. Britain took the island in 1664, and English and Welsh farmers followed.
For most of the next two centuries Staten Island stayed stubbornly rural while the rest of New York accelerated. Giuseppe Garibaldi, between campaigns to unify Italy, spent two years here making candles in Rosebank. Alice Austen photographed everyday life from her house on the north shore with an eye that wouldn't be fully recognized until she was nearly 80. The borough was folded into Greater New York City in 1898, and the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge — the longest suspension bridge in the world when it opened in 1964 — finally connected it to Brooklyn, though Staten Island has always insisted on its own pace.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
Summers are warm and humid, winters cold with occasional snow. Spring and early autumn — roughly April through June and September through October — give you the most comfortable conditions for walking the grounds at Snug Harbor or Historic Richmond Town.
Right now
Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.